We are moving into app economy and that is happening very fast. There are many predictions on the marketplace on this trend with Gartner forecasting that 25% of enterprises will have their own enterprise apps stores for managing corporate-sanctioned apps on PCs and mobile devices – all this within 4 years. Others are saying that this is already happening and it won’t take four years. Whatever the case is, ISVs needs to pay attention to this as CIOs in large organizations need to take control of the situation with deployed apps both in tablets as well as smart phones.

I think there is a big misconception in the word “app” when thinking about business models. Many relate an “app” to small apps used by smartphones with either free or almost free business model. These are mostly consumer-focused apps, but the trend is that consumers will be using their smartphones to conduct business using apps, but these apps will be connected to backend cloud solutions that bring the scalability and logic to the game. Look at an app as just the UI to full-blown solutions where end users can run their business with small devices or tablets and use the cloud infrastructure as foundation.

The forecast for App Economy is huge and according to APPNATION, App Economy is going to reach $151B by 2017. What it really means for ISVs and any software developers organization is that they need to really get a better understanding how app economy is going to impact them going forward. CIOs will be asking questions how an ISV will support enterprise app stores and how the ISVs will support these app stores with their solutions. I am a bit amazed how little there is discussion off apps in our workshops but I think this is going to change going forward. Based on the study by APPNATION, the majority of mobile device owners under 45 years are using video apps and this supports my previous blog entry of eLearning.

There will be a need for both consumer-oriented and enterprise-oriented apps stores and it will be a space that will bring new opportunities for many players. The competition in this space will be based on innovation of solutions that people want to use and the use is measured on how much content the apps consume from the cloud. It is not rocket science, but it is a new world that people need to get used to.

In the end of the day, apps will have to be monetized in one way or the other and that is where the subscription economy comes to play and organizations need to understand how to price their solutions and all this based on value pricing.